After days of intense condemnation, yet another blow for Congressman Steve King and his GOP allies came from the Des Moines Register this morning. In a blistering new editorial, the Register’s editorial board calls out Governor Kim Reynolds and Iowa Republicans for consistently choosing partisan loyalty over moral leadership.
They went on to say that Iowa Republicans can no longer get away with their half-hearted attempts to distance themselves from Congressman King’s toxic ideology:
“They have until now been safe in the knowledge that King’s constituents would keep sending him back to Washington, regardless of how many taxpayer dollars he spent soaking up right-wing nationalism in Europe instead of working for his district. That needs to change. Iowans should not let them brush this off with a wink and a shrug.”
“It’s time for a real reckoning in the state of Iowa about who we are and who we will be. Do we stand by our founding values and the belief that we are one nation, one people, created equal or are we willing to throw everything overboard for partisan interests? The people of Iowa are better than this, but time and time again, our current leaders have proven that they are not. That’s why they’ll be looking for new jobs on November 6th,” said Iowa Democratic Party Spokesperson Tess Seger.
DES MOINES REGISTER EDITORIAL: GOP can’t keep shrugging as Rep. Steve King, President Trump pander to white nationalists
“Meanwhile, Iowa Republican leaders have occasionally dared to disagree with King when asked, but have not called him out for his hateful rhetoric. Gov. Kim Reynolds has kept him on as her campaign co-chairman, while muttering increasingly thin-lipped denials that she agrees with his ideological extremism.
Republican leaders could get away with that until now.The GOP has been turning a deaf ear for years as King has vilified undocumented immigrants as drug mules, palled around with alt-right international leaders and declared himself the defender of the white man’s culture.
National Republican leaders had nothing to say when King endorsed a white-supremacist candidate for mayor of Toronto, Canada. As Register columnist Rekha Basu noted, however, conservative media representatives, including writers for the Washington Examiner and Weekly Standard, called out King as “deplorable” and entirely focused on race-based politics.
Even so, the GOP’s upper echelon could have passed for oil paintings after it was reported that King met with the leader of a far-right Austrian group associated with the neo-Nazi movement — while on a trip paid for by a group dedicated to preserving the history of the Holocaust.
They have until now been safe in the knowledge that King’s constituents would keep sending him back to Washington, regardless of how many taxpayer dollars he spent soaking up right-wing nationalism in Europe instead of working for his district. That needs to change. Iowans should not let them brush this off with a wink and a shrug.”
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